Predicted Oscar Winners - 2009

The Numbers' annual Oscar polls have proved to be remarkably accurate predictors of
the final results on Oscar night.
We call results based on the hundreds of The Numbers readers who vote in our
Predict the Oscars competition.

We've received all the votes now, and are ready to make predictions in all categories.
Percentage figures are the percentage of The Numbers readers who believe a movie or performance
will win.
They are a rough guide to how likely a particular movie is to win in a category - for
example, we're pretty certain WALL-E will win Best Animated Feature.

The big winner looks as though it will be
Slumdog Millionaire,
which is a big favorite for Best Picture and for which Danny Boyle is an overwhelming
favorite for the Best Directing Oscar.
It's also favored in five other categories: Adapted Screenplay, Song and Score, Film Editing and Cinematography.
That could give it seven wins on the night -- comfortably the best among all films.

The two closest races among the major awards are Best Actor in a Leading Role and Actress in a Supporting Role.
In the former, Mickey Rourke (56.7%) is seen as having the edge over
Sean Penn (33.4%).
In the latter, Penelope Cruz garners just over half the vote (56.2%), with
the rest of the votes evenly split between the other four nominees.
Viola Davis is actually in second place with just 12.1% of the vote.

The most remarkable feature of this year's vote is that the favorite scores over 50% of the vote in all but one of the categories (and
the odd-category-out is "Short Film (Live Action)", which is nearly always very hard to predict).
That's by far the highest level of confidence we've seen across the board in all the years we've been running the contest.
There are likely to be some surprises on the night, but our readers seem to agree strongly on who the favorites are.